OPEN Innovation to Face Off Data Center Challenges
I’ve been active with hardware infrastructure since the Windows NT era, when Novell with SFT level III and Pentium Pro was all the craze and networks were built of coax cables running token ring. (Yes, I’m that old).
Generations and generations of technology innovation later, the data center industry is bumping up against the amount of energy available worldwide, and cooling and space are challenging to deal with in any data center. We must pivot. It’s essential that we re-think how we design, run, operate and optimize data centers.
Since my days in Intel corporation, I’ve had a front seat to technology transitions and adoption of innovation in the compute, network and storage space. Data centers are at the heart of digital transformation, which is touching almost every industry and person on the planet. All the way from the massive hyperscale data centers to the tier-2 Cloud service providers and co-location partners and enterprises. We’ve built an enormous and diverse ecosystem of industry players around data centers that cover any conceivable topic – from the financial investments and insurance down to the network and power equipment and connector specifications. All these industry players work hand-hand based on strict standards and protocols to ensure smooth data center operations.
The data center space has always been a hotbed of innovation, and the continuous digitization of society will continue this trend for some time to come. The demand for capacity is likely to soar, but it’s challenged by the availability of locations to build data centers, the cost and available supply of energy and skilled staff to build and maintain these critical facilities, to name a few. At the same time, the data centers are under increasing scrutiny and regulations. And the mass adoption of AI is driving an increased set of demands for the data center, at a speed we’ve not seen before.
Because of these competing dynamics, it’s an industry that naturally fosters innovation to overcome these challenges. And over time, the business of building and running a data center has been standardized with modular data center filled with 19-inch racks and x86 infrastructure building blocks complimented with adequate cooling, fiber and power networks. We industrialized it to a level where a have a good understanding of the business model, the available solutions, the leading indicators and how to align supply and demand.
However, the complexities described above are quickly compiling as the demand is outstripping capacity and the cost and availability of energy is no longer endless. The requirements are increasing to a level where it’s unsustainable. In addition, we all want to be sustainable, but the speed of innovation is driving new technology adoption at an increased pace.
When we consider innovating the data center ecosystem, it’s key to get as many creative ideas as possible from a wide range of players so we can filter and fine-tune to find the best solution. The OPEN innovation model is a great way to do that. I believe this mechanism will be pivotal for this industry to leverage to out-innovate ourselves of the data center infrastructure challenges we are facing.
Luckily, the data center space is no stranger to OPEN. A lot of the innovative services delivered out of data center are based (in part) on open-source software. OPEN is an innovation engine, I was once told, and I continue to see this statement being validated in our industry. I’m going to abstract a few things here to a high level to give a few examples.
Let’s take a look at some of the most recent technological adoptions that effected data centers:
- HPC matured because it leveraged standardized X86 compute and ethernet networks with open-source operating system + tools. It was a cheap alternative to the big scale up & proprietary HPC solutions.
- Once we complemented those ingredients with ADSL & Fiber and 3G as a ubiquitous and affordable last-mile connectivity solution for companies and homes and storage cost lowered in part in due to opensource solutions levering storage in a new way, we got cloud computing. We now had a cheap & reliable alternative to local storage.
- BigData was a combination of relatively cheap storage and compute and allowed us to do analysis on fast data lakes of information, and we had a lot of open-source tools such as data sciences benches developed which evolved to assist us in this analysis.
- Now add the open-source frameworks and tools for AI to the mix above and we’ve arrived in the age of Artificial intelligence.
As you can see, Open Source had a hand in all these major tipping points and while software is an innovation engine, it needs hardware to make it work to deliver its promise.
What if we could take the power of OPEN innovation and apply it to the data center IT infrastructure space?
The Open Compute Project does exactly that. It takes this OPEN approach so common in software development and applies this framework to the development of future data center IT infrastructure. This community-led effort spans many different domains, allowing all the different ecosystem players to come together and align on innovation efforts in the data center space. From the concrete used to build data center down to the chiplets on the board, there is a sub-project anyone can join to consume, contribute or learn about the latest developments.
Another exciting thing about OCP is its origin. It was instantiated by META (formerly Facebook) who in 2011 foresaw this need to redesign the IT infrastructure. Based on their scale and complexity, it’s only natural they had this foresight. But it also drove the innovation coming out of OCP. Because of their scale and size, the hyperscale’s engineering team had the manpower, skills, experience and the resources to come up with a different formfactor and power delivery, which still fits in the so loved 19-inch rack outer dimensions but with a 21-inch inner width in the rack. This way there is more physical real estate to house components and move sufficient air for cooling through the unit. And by centralizing power distribution for the whole rack via a busbar, a saving up to 45% power consumption can be achieved per rack! These are just some examples of the innovation that META brought to OCP, and there are many more.
Many companies soon joined the ranks to consume, contribute or adopt OCP in their offerings. The most recent one was Nvidia, whose DGX infrastructure now leverages OCP for power and liquid cooling purposes. Both Jensen Wang and Mark Zuckerburg even commented about the flexibility and cost savings of OCP in a keynote during SIGGRAPH 2024.
Unknown to many, a number of OCP innovations are most likely already in your existing infrastructure. Per example the OCP3 nic’s are widely adopted by many traditional vendors in their current product designs and have even become the defacto standard. Also the recent modular redesign of motherboards to a more modular design which is known as the Data Center Modular Hardware System (or DC-MHS for short) is also making its way into a number of new products entering the market. Examples are the recently announced Dell PowerEdge R670 CSP Edition and R770 CSP Edition servers or the Supermicro X14 servers.
Open is an innovation engine and the OCP foundation offers a community for all the IT infrastructure industry players to align and build actual solutions to face the challenges this industry is up against. It’s an exciting community that is gaining more momentum and one to watch or even better, participate in!
I’ve been active with hardware infrastructure since the Windows NT era, when Novell with SFT level III and Pentium Pro was all the craze and networks were built of coax cables running token ring. (Yes, I’m that old).
Generations and generations of technology innovation later, the data center industry is bumping up against the amount of energy available worldwide, and cooling and space are challenging to deal with in any data center. We must pivot. It’s essential that we re-think how we design, run, operate and optimize data centers.
Since my days in Intel corporation, I’ve had a front seat to technology transitions and adoption of innovation in the compute, network and storage space. Data centers are at the heart of digital transformation, which is touching almost every industry and person on the planet. All the way from the massive hyperscale data centers to the tier-2 Cloud service providers and co-location partners and enterprises. We’ve built an enormous and diverse ecosystem of industry players around data centers that cover any conceivable topic – from the financial investments and insurance down to the network and power equipment and connector specifications. All these industry players work hand-hand based on strict standards and protocols to ensure smooth data center operations.
The data center space has always been a hotbed of innovation, and the continuous digitization of society will continue this trend for some time to come. The demand for capacity is likely to soar, but it’s challenged by the availability of locations to build data centers, the cost and available supply of energy and skilled staff to build and maintain these critical facilities, to name a few. At the same time, the data centers are under increasing scrutiny and regulations. And the mass adoption of AI is driving an increased set of demands for the data center, at a speed we’ve not seen before.
Because of these competing dynamics, it’s an industry that naturally fosters innovation to overcome these challenges. And over time, the business of building and running a data center has been standardized with modular data center filled with 19-inch racks and x86 infrastructure building blocks complimented with adequate cooling, fiber and power networks. We industrialized it to a level where a have a good understanding of the business model, the available solutions, the leading indicators and how to align supply and demand.
However, the complexities described above are quickly compiling as the demand is outstripping capacity and the cost and availability of energy is no longer endless. The requirements are increasing to a level where it’s unsustainable. In addition, we all want to be sustainable, but the speed of innovation is driving new technology adoption at an increased pace.
When we consider innovating the data center ecosystem, it’s key to get as many creative ideas as possible from a wide range of players so we can filter and fine-tune to find the best solution. The OPEN innovation model is a great way to do that. I believe this mechanism will be pivotal for this industry to leverage to out-innovate ourselves of the data center infrastructure challenges we are facing.
Luckily, the data center space is no stranger to OPEN. A lot of the innovative services delivered out of data center are based (in part) on open-source software. OPEN is an innovation engine, I was once told, and I continue to see this statement being validated in our industry. I’m going to abstract a few things here to a high level to give a few examples.
Let’s take a look at some of the most recent technological adoptions that effected data centers:
- HPC matured because it leveraged standardized X86 compute and ethernet networks with open-source operating system + tools. It was a cheap alternative to the big scale up & proprietary HPC solutions.
- Once we complemented those ingredients with ADSL & Fiber and 3G as a ubiquitous and affordable last-mile connectivity solution for companies and homes and storage cost lowered in part in due to opensource solutions levering storage in a new way, we got cloud computing. We now had a cheap & reliable alternative to local storage.
- BigData was a combination of relatively cheap storage and compute and allowed us to do analysis on fast data lakes of information, and we had a lot of open-source tools such as data sciences benches developed which evolved to assist us in this analysis.
- Now add the open-source frameworks and tools for AI to the mix above and we’ve arrived in the age of Artificial intelligence.
As you can see, Open Source had a hand in all these major tipping points and while software is an innovation engine, it needs hardware to make it work to deliver its promise.
What if we could take the power of OPEN innovation and apply it to the data center IT infrastructure space?
The Open Compute Project does exactly that. It takes this OPEN approach so common in software development and applies this framework to the development of future data center IT infrastructure. This community-led effort spans many different domains, allowing all the different ecosystem players to come together and align on innovation efforts in the data center space. From the concrete used to build data center down to the chiplets on the board, there is a sub-project anyone can join to consume, contribute or learn about the latest developments.
Another exciting thing about OCP is its origin. It was instantiated by META (formerly Facebook) who in 2011 foresaw this need to redesign the IT infrastructure. Based on their scale and complexity, it’s only natural they had this foresight. But it also drove the innovation coming out of OCP. Because of their scale and size, the hyperscale’s engineering team had the manpower, skills, experience and the resources to come up with a different formfactor and power delivery, which still fits in the so loved 19-inch rack outer dimensions but with a 21-inch inner width in the rack. This way there is more physical real estate to house components and move sufficient air for cooling through the unit. And by centralizing power distribution for the whole rack via a busbar, a saving up to 45% power consumption can be achieved per rack! These are just some examples of the innovation that META brought to OCP, and there are many more.
Many companies soon joined the ranks to consume, contribute or adopt OCP in their offerings. The most recent one was Nvidia, whose DGX infrastructure now leverages OCP for power and liquid cooling purposes. Both Jensen Wang and Mark Zuckerburg even commented about the flexibility and cost savings of OCP in a keynote during SIGGRAPH 2024.
Unknown to many, a number of OCP innovations are most likely already in your existing infrastructure. Per example the OCP3 nic’s are widely adopted by many traditional vendors in their current product designs and have even become the defacto standard. Also the recent modular redesign of motherboards to a more modular design which is known as the Data Center Modular Hardware System (or DC-MHS for short) is also making its way into a number of new products entering the market. Examples are the recently announced Dell PowerEdge R670 CSP Edition and R770 CSP Edition servers or the Supermicro X14 servers.
Open is an innovation engine and the OCP foundation offers a community for all the IT infrastructure industry players to align and build actual solutions to face the challenges this industry is up against. It’s an exciting community that is gaining more momentum and one to watch or even better, participate in!
